Eric Baum wrote:
Richard> Every step of the following argument begs questions and lacks
Richard> force:
If you want a more complete argument, read the book.
One of the reasons for writing a book is not to have to engage in
arguments piecemeal.
Eric
I read your paper.
I am not sure how I would be helped by a "more complete" version of an
argument that already appears to be so severely broken.
As I see it, the root cause of the trouble (in your paper, in the
literature behind that paper, and in the sequence of arguments you
summarized) is that some people have been so obsessed with the idea of
turning concepts like "understanding" and "intelligence" into precisely
formulated concepts, amenable to mathematical proofs, that they are
willing to redefine and distort the meanings of those words in order to
strait-jacket them into the form they desire. In this manner, you quote
the COLT literature as having shown that understanding is, essentially,
compression.
It is rather like taking the concept of "happiness" and redefining it as
"Happiness = A Warm Puppy". By doing this, all of a sudden we have ways
to measure happiness by constructing a puppy density function, and we
can further refine it by measuring the temperature of the puppies, and
rating different puppies according their degree of puppiness. This is
great: we took the vague term "happiness" and formalized it so nicely
that now we can do math on the happiness density field. Huge amounts of
rigorous math can follow from this, including precise - and very
comforting - proofs about the properties of this new "happiness".
Trouble is, its all BS. Not because the math is wrong (the math is
great!), but because the initial distortion of the commonplace term was
such an egregious distortion.
So it is with redefinitions of the term "understanding" to be synonymous
with a variety of compression. This is an egregious distortion of the
real meaning of the term, and *everything* that follows from that
distortion is just nonsense.
Richard Loosemore.
Richard Loosemore
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